Ligi Civili

Regularisation applications often raise a deceptively simple question: who must show that a development does not harm its surroundings? At first glance, one might think that the Planning Authority must establish the existence of such harm before refusing regularisation. After all, the regulation itself appears to place the emphasis on the Authority’s judgment. Regulation 4(5) […]

When property is subject to temporary emphyteusis, the economic value of the property must be divided between two legal interests: the dominium utile, which entitles the emphyteuta to enjoy the property during the remaining duration of the emphyteusis, and the dominium directum, which entitles the ground-rent owner to receive the annual ground rent and to […]

At first sight, those who argue that Annex 2 of DC15 is legally problematic cannot simply be dismissed as irrational. Their reasoning is easy to understand. If a Local Plan states that development is limited to a specific number of floors — for example four floors— it seems natural to assume that the planning framework […]

Malta’s constitutional neutrality has long been treated as a settled domestic compromise. Yet, as the European Union recalibrates its external posture in response to shifting geopolitical pressures, that compromise is no longer insulated from supranational dynamics. The interaction between unanimity in the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the possible reconfiguration of political alignments within the […]

Wednesbury unreasonableness takes its name from Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223, a case arising from an everyday form of local regulatory power in the UK: the grant of a cinema licence subject to conditions. The local authority permitted a cinema to open on Sundays but attached a condition […]

The question whether “evidential onus” to justify a development proposal is placed upon an applicant in planning law cannot be answered without first clarifying what is meant by onus in a doctrinal sense. In classical common law theory, as developed in classical administrative and evidentiary jurisprudence, a distinction is drawn between the legal burden of […]